Gameduino is a really great Open Source FPGA project put together by James Bowman. It allows you to add graphics and audio to your projects using a nicely documented VGA adapter and Arduino libraries to program it. Take a look at the project page to learn more.

I’ve been hard at work on the DesignLab software and just wanted to share a video of how libraries will work in DesignLab. One of the major things we are doing with DesignLab is expanding on the Arduino IDE by coupling FPGA circuits to sketches. Every DesignLab project will be the combination of an FPGA circuit that you load to the Papilio DUO and a sketch that interacts with that circuit.

I was recently speaking with the FPGA wizard, Max Maxfield, about DesignLab and he pointed out that it is the Arduino libraries and the ability to share those libraries that make the Arduino great. He gave the advice that DesignLab should make creating and sharing FPGA libraries as easy and convenient as possible. Even better, provide a central location where people can share not only libraries but any projects they make with DesignLab. I took his words of wisdom to heart and have the first cut of that functionality ready to go.

Please take a look at this video to see how you can make your own libraries for DesignLab.

If you would like to kick the tires and check it out for yourself then please download the beta release of DesignLab. Please keep in mind this is a work in progress and still needs more refinement and it is only working in Windows at the moment.

Pedro Hernandez is a cofounder of Pcdemano.com a spanish website that makes reviews about the Arduino, raspberry pi, BananaPi and more. He recently decided to add FPGA’s to that list and chose the Papilio Pro as an FPGA development board to start with.

Today he posted his first review for an FPGA board and a nice introduction to FPGA’s for all the Spanish speakers out there.

Check this out, this is really cool. In this video Hamster grabs HDMI input from a special Wing that he designed and then converts it to 8-bit VGA format so he can send it out of the 8-bit VGA port of the LogicStart MegaWing!

Papilio community member “Offroad” put together this nice little ADC demo for the RetroCade Synth. It puts the ADC chips through their paces and includes a PlanAhead project and source code.

Anyway, one result is an ADC demo that got out of necessity a little more polished than planned.

Controls LED brightness with input 1 (the one closest to the SD card). The signal pin faces the edge of the board.

Dumps all 16 channels through USB. Set up virtual com port for the 2nd USB interface, open Teraterm and connect with default settings (9600 baud, 8 bits, 1 stop bit)

There is some information out there regarding control of this ADC that I find questionable, after reading the data sheet (It states explicitly that there are no timing requirements between falling edges of CS and CLK so they may change in the same cycle and the whole control logic simplifies greatly)

ADCs run at 50 % of maximum throughput, that is, they take turns. 8 frames are captured in one shot.

The data sheet shows 10 bits even though it’s an 8-bit ADC. The implementation picks the correct ones, others are apparently zero (edit: no they are not – you get 10 bits of data out of the ADC)

Papilio user Fantasma25 has designed a new audio DAC wing and decided to share his work with us on the forum. The new wing It’s based on the MAX5556 DAC, it has an I2S-compatible interface and up to 50KHz sampling rate which is perfect for standard 44.1 and 48 KHz sampling rates and a resolution of 16 and 24 bits.

The board does not contain any output buffer as I wanted the board to be as small as possible. It only has the MAX5556, a couple of passives and a 3.5mm stereo jack.

Here is a look at the render of the board:

For more details including the source files and schematics please drop by the forum thread here and join the discussion, any help or idea is greatly appreciated.